Artist Statement
My work melds my Midwestern rural roots with a multi-media practice including fibers, sculpture and drawing. The intention is to foster a curiosity and love of the natural world through exuberant color and imagery. Often resulting in a maximalist “where’s Waldo” smorgasbord of the natural world, I entice the viewer to keep exploring. This opens the door to conversations around native species, conservation, and caring for the Earth. In the face of the crippling effect of apocalypse fatigue, I hope to start that conversation from a point of love and awe. My work also embraces the figure, as the goal is ultimately to reposition our sense of being “of nature,” as opposed to the modern sense of being separate from it. This work is also indelibly impacted by a long-standing meditation practice, and a desire to integrate a deeply personal practice with the day-to-day work in the studio.
In terms of process and technique, drawing is most often the primary act, even if executed outside the route of traditional pencil on paper. Despite using layered processes, I want the viewer to be able to connect to my work on a fundamental level and drawing acts as both an accessible and primal point of entry. In some work, I write poetry with a 3D printing pen, building layers to create sculptural works, so that words become drawing. In my fiber work, I describe creating imagery with thread and a sewing machine as the inverse of drawing, stitched on a painterly field of hand-dyed wool from the Gardner family farm. This melding of drawing and sculpture with fibers is also a means of recontextualizing “women’s work.” Blending historical craft and the generational passing down of knowledge with contemporary practice grounds my work, connecting my rural roots with the here and now.
Artist Biography
Rachelle Gardner-Roe has been working as an artist in the Kansas City area since the mid-2000s. She grew up in the rural countryside outside of Adrian, MO, on the native land of the Osage, Kickapoo, Kaskaskia and Sioux tribes. She received a Bachelors in Interior Architecture from Kansas State University in 2004. This background in design allowed her to explore various media through a lifelong interest in the fine arts. Her emphasis in furniture design influenced her path in sculpture while her family’s fateful adoption of three sheep in the 1990s eventually led her down the road of fibers and a practice rooted in the land.
Gardner-Roe has been commissioned for private and public projects, notably for the new Kansas City International Airport, St. Teresa’s Academy, Art in the Loop Foundation and A.I.R Gallery of New York. Her work is in collections such as The Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art, The City of Overland Park, KS, The City of Kansas City, MO, and American Century Investments as well as various private collections. She is a Charlotte Street Foundation Studio Resident Alumni and a multi-grant recipient from the ArtsKC Regional Arts Council. She has exhibited regionally and nationally, including The Mulvane Art Museum, The Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles, The Leedy-Voulkos Art Center and The Chautauqua Institution, among others. Her first solo museum exhibition is scheduled for the spring of 2025 at the Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art in St. Joseph, MO. Having spent many years living on the Kansas side of the state line, she now lives and works in Kansas City, MO, with a studio in the historic West Bottoms.